Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to integrated supply chain management and more particularly to a reverse logistics management system that can automatically identify, prioritize and route returned inventory assets based on manufacturing priorities.
Description of the Related Art
Modern manufacturers are always in a state of flux, assembling and tearing down specialized products. These specialized products are produced specifically to the configuration requirements of a customer and are often referred to as one-of-a-kind configurations. The teardown may result from various events, including products built for extended failure analysis tests, products built for loaners for other parts of a company under a warranty period, or even products that were cancelled during the manufacturing process. One problem is that tearing down specialized products is costly, induces damage, impacts cycle time, and manufacturer capacity during peak manufacturing periods.
Some companies build up products as finished goods and put these goods into stock. These fixed stock items are then advertised for sale as fixed products with a defined released part number (PN). Some companies also resell cancelled inventory in a similar fashion. Other companies tear down most of the returned or specialized products back into purchased or subassembly components. Upon receipt of an order, the companies then build the new customer orders from these parts specifically to the customer configuration. These practices result in damaged components, additional scrap from one-time-used parts, and impacts resources during manufacturing peak production.
Regardless of why they occur, product returns complicate the management of production execution and inventory reuse by introducing an uncertain reverse flow of partially assembled assets and materials. This is particularly true when only a subset of the components of a product can be recovered for reuse. In such cases, managing component inventories to preserve a reasonable amount of balance among those components that are recovered and those that are not can be quite challenging. When the system produces multiple products that share components (some of which are recovered), the task becomes even more complex.
One of the current problems, which occurs when orders are canceled or returned to the manufacturing facility, is a significant impact to inventory availability for new orders; particularly, those orders where the configuration is highly complex. Although current industry standard inventory control systems can facilitate restoring the returned inventory to stock for re-use, numerous problems still remain. For example, excess inventory accumulates as the returned inventory restored to stock may not be immediately in demand. Miss-shipments occur even though short-part inventory exists in cancelled orders. Significant cost is incurred during attempts to manually manage the returned inventory, especially due to ever changing priorities in the manufacturing environment. Unnecessary inventory pulls are initiated from a second party warehouse (e.g., the hub) as well as the sub-optimal usage of the inventory that is recovered.